Horticulture

Shortly before the New Gardens Organiser at the National Garden Scheme (NGS) is due to arrive at our farmhouse in north Norfolk, my youngest child – in the throes of a screaming meltdown – eyeballs me as she rips the heads off a row of giant ‘Mount Everest’ alliums. By the time Fiona Black arrives, I’m spiralling into an existential crisis myself. Why did I bother asking if we’d be suitable, I wonder, contemplating the futility of gardening alongside children and dogs. Sliding tackles have taken out most of the alliums that survived the dogs’ digging. I retrieve a football from a bed of irises and chuck a bottle of Roundup weedkiller out of sight (soon-to-be illegal in the UK, but so effective, it’s the chemical compound I just can’t kick).

When Juliet said of Romeo that ‘a rose by any other name would smell as sweet’, she spoke a common truth. We identify and love flowers by and for their scent. But you will struggle to find many scented flowers for sale in Britain. This is largely because in the 1950s, the UK’s home-grown flower business was flattened by the Dutch government. Huge investment in its domestic flower industry saw the first air-freighted blooms arrive in this country, followed by the ‘Flying Dutchman’ lorries in the 1980s. Today the average Briton spends £28 a year on flowers, up from £8 in 1984, yet 86 per cent of these are imported, most via the Netherlands from Ecuador, Kenya and Ethiopia.